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116817-10232014-morning-coffee-my-head-is-filled-with-tiny-people-with-hammers-edition
Content ---- ---- ---- Lucky for some...I've had so many of them Bronze models my house looks like I'm playing Frontier!! Also useless 10s dies that are soulbound and you can't do nothing with but sell them, should be account bound dyes really! | |} ---- ---- ---- I can answer that. WoW is just that damn easy and was made easier with the latest patch. Most of my friends are complaining about "3-buttons rotations" and playing an Esper on WildStar, it pretty much is what we have too. However, combat is much more active and difficult. I cannot fathom why Blizzard chose to dumb things down even further. Maybe it'll change at level 100, but I digress. Just completed Crimson Badlands. I can't stand that place anymore but I must endure for 4 more days. Luckily, good music goes a long way. | |} ---- ---- ---- We always do! If I finish tonight, we'll get a drink! | |} ---- ---- Aw man, now I'm doubly sorry my poor Exiles are still lowbies. Heh, I did say my schedule was gonna be dodgy. I hopped on this morning and the maintenance cleared out the bugged extras so I was able to whack the target. Kitty steps out of the transmat muttering something about dodgy mercenaries. "May as well do some more recon", she says to herself. She ensures that her stealth generator is fully charged and carefully rounds the cliff obscuring the view of the facility. Things are quiet... and only a few guards are patrolling. Off in the distance she hears an explosion, several cheers of "Science!" followed by insance giggling. "Excellent", she exhales as exanite claws slide from their sheaths. Minutes later a mechari guard lays sparking in the snow and Scientist Trappa's experimenting days have been de-funded... permanently. | |} ---- ---- Much as I love Chua...Cassians have amazing hair...lol | |} ---- Tsk tsk tsk.... why is this even debatable? :P | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- I assumed the dual capitalization was intentional. I did wonder if there was a reason why you chose T2 as her surname. Oh no! Kaelish is on fire! *sprays with hose* This seems oddly familiar. :ph34r: I have a similar issue with my Mordesh stalker. I love just about everything about him except his stance as he's moving in stealth. He looks like Igor, and it's horrible. I try not to watch. | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- Is that... Kiki? That is the coolest cup of coffee ever created in the known universe. (Actually, are these images imposed by computer from some kind of meme site?) Today I will go about harvesting ore like nobody's business. It's amazing how fast you can make plat with a sizable T4 harvest circle— I'm probably making about 2-3 plat a day now from this alone! Otherwise I'm still caught in the 'waiting for D3 rut'. Sadly a dev post I saw today mentioned D3 isn't even going back up on PTR until up to a week from now, which means we won't likely see the actual drop until mid-late November. Poopy. :( Tomorrow is Friday... so close! | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- Fuuuuunny. :P I can stay up late if I wanna! ... Mostly. KHT wasn't broken though. .-. I made a post about this. The issue existed on Carbine's end, though thankfully they've remedied the problem so KHT can fetch the appropriate data now. Woo! Good luck judges. :) Ooooh tonight, everyone needs to nag me about swapping my spec to drop Homeward bound (nightmarish in vet dungeons). Feel free to glob me with PMs for spec suggestions, if anyone wants. :P | |} ---- Oops sorry didn't mean to imply that KHT was broken before. The whole thing was definitely Carbine's fault - I'm just glad the problem is finally fixed :) | |} ---- Yeah, I can't figure out what everyone was complaining about. You can try over and over for medals; I wasn't in a hurry to get gold. Some people threw a fit like that was absolutely unacceptable. That said, it's kind of true that it's hard to troll gold medal parties by planting the wrong sproutling, or to even unintentionally screw it up if you're new. | |} ---- ---- ---- Sounds like the same mindset as was common with dungeons at launch. Some people see "we're going for gold" as "if we don't get gold, we've failed." I am amazed that you had three raid groups for a world event. I've only seen Dommies put together one plus a few extra people, and getting even one full raid group seems to be rare. | |} ---- I get the word out :D And not sure why it was so popular, but it was a BIG group. We owned the whole thing from front to back in ten minutes IIRC. Also, just took a couple minutes to do another Redux of one of the bands I didn't cover well enough the first time through. Since I covered Australian avant garde metal band Alchemist this Monday, I wanted to reintroduce the greater public to Ameican avant garde metal band, and overall awesome entity, Yakuza! If there was any justice in the world, this would be unnecessary. Yakuza deserves to be known by everyone everywhere. | |} ---- ---- Pretty much anything and everything that could have been improved by having access to a lot more people, especially open world events. | |} ---- Same old same old as far as the forums go. Since megaservers, it's been a lot better in game, but the Luminai (EU PVP) server people aren't happy because a bunch of their major raiding guilds transferred to Jabbit before the transfers were closed. There's a lot of people asking for another suit of working gear so we can hot swap and maintain a support set without taking up inventory space. But the forums are largely the same. | |} ---- This is now my favorite representation of Chua. So! Good morning for the rest of the morningpeople! I'm enjoying my day off so far to work on a bit of game backlog, but I intend to jump into Wildstar before 10 PM PDT this time! I feel like I've been missing so much due to four night shifts in a row. Maybe do some dungeons! Meanwhile, last night I got some more healing practice in! And by that I mean watching the ground when healing can be surprisingly more difficult than it seems. Or maybe it's just Elyona's arena, though I don't remember that being that bad. Anyhow, off to watch The Book of Life, and then I dunno and then Wildstar! | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- Welcome back! Glad you're feeling better. | |} ---- ---- ---- Me too! Though it may take me all weekend to read them :P | |} ---- ---- ---- It's not good news. It depends on who was laid off and why. I'm worried. I think this is the precursor to NCSoft reaching past the original drivers and grabbing the wheel. | |} ---- Well post-launch teams tend to be smaller than pre-launch teams, mostly additional artists and designers to help flesh out the world. It looks like what happened at Carbine was a double event: the normal post-launch culling on top of a broad NCSoft RIF. Hopefully Carbine didn't lose any key personnel. | |} ---- That can't be good. If their idea of a good franchise is Guild Wars then WildStar might be headed that way. I mean, 60 cuts within a company that has what? 300ish employees? This is the first time I am actually worried beyond the simple doom and gloom... | |} ---- *Nods* When I saw this- "However, we are looking to move into new business segments like mobile and tablet games as well as explore emerging technologies." All I could hear in my head was~ Buy 2 lives for 99 cents!!! :( | |} ---- This is not nessarily true. The entire PC industry is moving to mobile form factors. PC gaming necessarily will have to shift along with that. That's going to mean more concepts being incorporated in games such as touch interfaces and camera/accelerometer based controls. But it doesn't mean a reduction in computing power. To give an example - right now my Surface Pro 3 outperforms my 3-year old HP Elitebook laptop when it comes to just about everything I do at work. And yes, it runs games fairly well - I purposely tested that when I got the thing, just to see if I could do it. The only deficiency it has is local storage - but that's a problem that will be gone in a few years, because SSD sizes continue to increase. Icing on the cake, it *nearly* outperforms my 4-year old gaming system that sits on my desk at home. As early as next year it's likely there will be tablets on the market that have enough local storage to handle modern MMOs just fine - you might want to dock them while you're playing so you can use a bigger monitor, but you'll probably be able to run Wildstar... on a tablet. And that experience will be just like the experience you get today on your desktop PC. That sort of changes the paradigm, don't you think? | |} ---- I would've argued with you over the original GW, but after GW2 I have to agree. my worst nightmare Unfortunately, my objections are not in reference to computing power, or your post would have been reassuring. My primary objection is to the touchscreen interfaces that are not anywhere near as precise as mouse/keyboard interfaces. While it's fine for simplified games like Angry Birds, they simply do not lend themselves to skill-based games to the level that we expect in games like MMOs. My secondary objection is that the mobile app community is largely based upon the microtransaction system that I am staunchly opposed to supporting, which means that every time a company makes this shift in focus, less of the gaming industry appeals to me. | |} ---- I read that in Phineas T. Rotostar's voice and added "From ProtoStar!" at the end. This is how much of an impact this game has made for me >< | |} ---- ---- It doesn't for me Nep. I mean I totally agree with your point but I don't want to play games like Wildstar on a 10 inch tablet. After rereading what you wrote about docking the tablet... it still means you need all the wireless peripherals with a 12 pack of batteries nearby. Not worth the bother for me. That said, I DO play games on my tablet, phone and laptop....just not MMO's. | |} ---- It isn't good news but I don't think we know the impact yet, and I'd hate for speculation to get us into a downward spiral like what has happened so many times before. It might be that the impact will be minimal and that everything will be fine - unless, of course, people panic over this. I think that communication from the producers about how this will impact development schedules is probably needed in very short order. For my part, I'm going to continue to try and be optimistic until bad news actually arrives. So far as we know, development schedules are not impacted. Worrying over this without any evidence doesn't really help, and Wildstar is a game that we can all still enjoy the same way we have been while we wait to see what happens. | |} ---- I don't either - that's why I have a docking station for the tablet that plugs into a 28 inch monitor :) Actually, in a month or two, I should have a miracast adapter so that I can just wirelessly stream the video to my 40 inch TV. (You can get those now, by the way, but I'm waiting on the next-gen ones to show up because they'll get better performance). But I'm just trying to point out that the shift to mobile doesn't mean that things will be dumbed down. If anything, I think we may find all kinds of unique new concepts once developers get used to the new platforms. | |} ---- Very short order indeed. Silence would be the worst thing here. They are already walking on super thin glass and this announcement just made some serious cracks in it. Good thing the major alternatives in MMOs turned out to be mostly terrible for me. | |} ---- I would not blame any player or guild right now for doing contingency planning. That said, Wildstar *has* raised the bar in terms of what constitutes fun gameplay. When I look out at released games available now, there aren't that many titles that I really feel like I could move to, let alone take my guild (and some of you...) with me. So let's just hope that Wildstar continues to be home for a while longer :) | |} ---- The tablet you have is rare and a beast compared to the bulk of the rest of the mobile market. Mobile games by and large are dominated by casual games (Candy Crush/Angry Birds). Sounds like WildStar is NCSoft's last MMO at least in the Western market. | |} ---- Well, like I said, the only thing that would cause me to leave is if the game goes F2P. I'm on record saying that. And I mean it. I was heartened when Carbine came out and said it wasn't on the table yet. I'm worried because this might very well mean it wasn't their table that made any difference. I've got friends waiting to come into the game now that aren't pulling the trigger because they figure the game is going to F2P Hell and WoD is coming out. And, at this point, I can't say anything to assuage that. These aren't good signs. We'll see how it shakes out. There is no tablet on Earth capable of keeping up with my desktop, and my desktop seems to be one of the few that can shovel Wildstar. | |} ---- I concur. I am not a positive person by nature and I'd rather dodge the crash and burn. However, I do so love WildStar...mainly its combat system and that is why I would have issues going back to any tab-targeting games. The game was released with the wrong mindset and because of that, well, here we are. Not sure who thought that difficult meant timegating anything and everything. Dead horse is dead though so best not to go there. Someone on Reddit wrote the following: "Lets be absolutely clear. Carbine's plan for Wildstar at the moment needs to be generating profit. If they do not generate profit, NCSoft will simply cancel the game. NCSoft doesn't take losses on the chin while the developers sort out the issues, Ncsoft slashes and burns immediately." Can't say I am familiar with NCSoft's tendencies though I heard about them. If there is any truth to it, I guess my being worried is justified. | |} ---- I will admit that I work for a big technology company. I live in the future :) That said, I do live in the future. And it looks pretty damn nice, most days :D Edit: Still waiting on flying cars, though. | |} ---- I think the tablets are closer than you think though. A top of the line SP3 right now is an i7 processor, 8 GB of RAM, and a 512 GB SSD, with a hardware-accelerated DX11-capable video chipset. It's not unrealistic to expect the next evolution of tablets in general to scale up to 1TB SSDs and 16 GB of RAM. I'll let you know when the tablets start beating my ridiculously overbuilt water-cooled monster gaming PC at home. They're not quite there yet, but they're close :P | |} ---- ---- I'm so freakin' jealous right now. | |} ---- Funny that, I'm cooling an FX9590 with a Noctua NH-D14 without any issues. I was always afraid of springing a leak the way they used to. I've heard it happens less these days, but I'm still nervous. Still, you need a monster case to be able to handle the size of the heat sink. Mine's a great machine. I've never heard of a tablet or laptop really being close. I'm currently being choked by my video card (I still use an Nvidia 760 GTX until I scrounge up enough cash for a titan), but otherwise I'm backing it with 32 gb of RAM and a regular old 2 Tb HDD. By the time they make a better tablet, I'll have upgraded my video card, and tablets will be miles away. Which is good, because I have an inherent dislike of touch screens. Despite my PC, I got a Motorola Photon specifically for the slide out keyboard, and I still use my PC for pretty much everything. I guess I'm just a really old brand of nerd. | |} ---- ---- Based on the size of it, it could very well be The Defile. Patch notes will confirm once they release them although Cougar mentioned that they will lag behind. That being said, I just got back from tango class (gasp!) with my SO. We were convinced to try it out by our Spanish friends who also happen to be a couple. I don't dance. I can't dance. Except for this. I have a knack for this. New tango, Argentine tango, electro tango. You name it, I love it. A touch of class in my life. Funny how I feel strange for saying it because men dancing tango isn't the norm in English-speaking countries. Better to be weird than normal! | |} ---- ---- Those are part of The Defile. Enjoy! | |} ---- SSDs are way faster than old-style HDDs, but they're not quite to the same capacity sizes yet - that gap is closing fast though. I never realized how much disk performance impacts games until i upgraded from 7200 RPM drives to 10k RPM drives in my gaming rig a few years ago - and WOW, what a difference. The upgrade from an HDD to an SSD is even more dramatic. To be honest, 32 GB RAM is way more than you need for *any* modern game - however I also know that you're an architect, so that amount of RAM is nice for drawings and such. I run 16 GB on my machine here, and most of the time, I've got lots of room to spare - except when I run into a game with a memory leak, anyway, which is relatively rare. Realistically though you can run pretty much any major game decently on 8 GB provided that you do two things: - Use a modern OS version (7 has about half the footprint of XP, and 8.1 has a smaller footprint than 7. 10 *should* end up with a smaller footprint still, by the look of things, but it's way early) - Don't run a bunch of crapware. I keep my system as clean as possible with only things I absolutely need loading up when the OS starts. All those updaters and monitoring applications and so on add a ton of unnecessary overhead (and most are poorly written with all kinds of vulnerabilities and performance issues) Dedicated RAM on your video card is helpful for loading textures, but it's not as mandatory as it used to be. It used to be that every time I bought a new video card, I had to double the RAM size on it to play games. A couple years ago though that trend levelled off - which is a good thing, too. If it had continued we'd all be running cards with 4 or 8 GB of dedicated video RAM, which is just silly. The truth is that video RAM caching requirements are going back down thanks to faster bus speeds and smarter software. That's one of the reasons that you see more gaming laptops - it's actually becoming viable again to put a serious graphics card on a laptop system board, because you don't have to load it down with all the extra RAM anymore. Anyway, on the touch screen - it's not an all or nothing proposition anymore :) Next time you're near a Microsoft Store or even a Best Buy, walk in and take a look a the tablets - especially if it's after Black Friday this year. A fair number of them will be hybrid clamshells or have removable keyboards. When I put my Surface in the dock with my full keyboard/mouse and the two monitors I have hooked up to it, I forget that it's a tablet - it looks and feels just like my normal PC. I only actually remember the touch interface when I pop it out of the dock and take it to a meeting (or when I'm using the Kindle app on it to turn it into a giant ebook reader) :) Anyway enough about this stuff, work is done, so Imma stop being technical for the day. I just got done trying to explain to a bunch of account people what the words "requirements document" actually mean. Sigh. MMOs are so much simpler. Can I just get paid to play Wildstar? | |} ---- I asked that. I don't think I could unless I want to work for a Chinese RMT. I actually REALLY don't want a mobile platform for gaming. I use a fairly large monitor that I sit some distance from, and I use a left hand array instead of a keyboard for gaming purposes. It's why I dislike sitting on a laptop as well; I requested an upgraded PC at work instead of an upgraded laptop I could use to work from home because I dislike them so much, even for work purposes. It's always good to get back to a mouse and keyboard after having to deal with one whenever I have to go mobile for a site visit. Some people are used to them. I find them ungainly. Needless to say, I REALLY appreciate the extra power at home (I do work from home at my PC, which is a damn sight better than my office PC or the laptop they were offering me) because you ain't seen nothing until you have one of our hospital projects open in Revit. Some of these are upwards of fifty permits over ten years with all their associated reference files, and Revit's not a kindly software even in the best of times. There are times where I'm running operations that eat all the RAM I have on my home PC. Not memory leaked, not an error, just that some of the operations can clock in at seven to ten HOURS of 100% resource allotment at work. Those times when you absolutely have to have it all ready to run right the first time. Anyway, a lot of my hardware just doesn't exist in laptops. The only reason the FX9590 can draw up to 4.7 ghz because they boosted the power requirement to 220W TDP, which is insane to imagine being stuffed into a shell any smaller than my Throne case with a top of the line cooler. Still, that's the reason that I haven't had any trouble in Wildstar even when other AMD CPU users have; I simply have too much power at my fingertips to really feel the game slow down. My PC is essentially opened up all over save for the GPU. Which is where I don't get it. I bought everything to almost completely upgrade my PC (I think the only thing left from the original is the kilowatt power supply and my GPU because it was newer) for a little over a thousand dollars. A high end GPU is going to cost me more than all of it combined. I was really hoping to get a Titan, but there was no way I was going to be able to afford it. Still no idea why the GPU is so much more expensive than the entire rest of my rig, even when all of that is top of the line and more than adequate for anything thrown at it. At this point, it's the only thing I can say about laptops and tablets; some of them I could get for less than the GPU itself. Otherwise, I guess I'm just too set in my ways. Laptops and tablets cater to nothing I actually want or need, and have serious limitations where I need it. That's not the bulk of the modern computer market these days; plenty of people don't need the kind of muscle I have and they have no problem with tablets or laptop limitations. I'm just a very old-school nerd from the beige box era that just doesn't see the value in sacrificing available power for mobility. I just wouldn't make use of any of the advantages. That said, even as a person who doesn't use tablets, I do love Windows 8.1. Just the sheer stability is a breath of fresh air for an OS that has done nothing but added extraneous features next to no one uses for over a decade. As someone who would probably go back to DOS if they made a modern version that lets you tab between programs, 8.1 is kind of what I was looking for. Less crap, more efficiency. We'll see though. My brother is testing the new Windows, and he says it's like someone tried to turn Windows 8 into Windows 7. Seems like a step backwards, IMO, to tack more things on that could leak after they made the huge jump to streamline. | |} ---- ---- Well, this was a few months ago and I already had a GTX760. I'll look into that though, thanks! My GPU is definitely my bottleneck. I'll compare them. 350 bucks is a lot easier to swallow if it's a dramatic upgrade from my GTX760. EDIT: Unfortunately, I don't have a firstborn child to sell for a Titan-Z. | |} ---- ---- I actually REALLY like Windows 8, but a lot of later Windows work was sort of extraneous to the point. Everything added to an OS might be useful, but it is another vulnerability to be attacked or another bit that could not play nice with a driver. Windows 8 sort of did what I wanted for entirely the wrong reason. They wanted to make sure the PC and tablet were on the same OS. I have no interest in tablets. I do, however, like Windows 8 a lot because it's very heavily streamlined. The one thing I don't like about it is that it either went too far or not far enough; it's stuck in the middle. I wouldn't mind if the entirety of Windows was that metro interface and tabbed setup. That would be fine for me. I wouldn't mind if they streamlined the oldschool desktop. That would also be fine. The one weakness it has is that it has both. They need to go one way or the other, retreat to the desktop and try to make it simple, or go all out and get rid of it entirely. Switching between both means a lot of the things I could use in one interface I can't use in the other. I'll tell you what, though, if you have a huge monitor, that Metro interface is a LOT more appealing than if you're using multiple smaller monitors. | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- Hey, I was fine with nothing but DOS. I'll make batch files to run the .exe for Wildstar from the C prompt all day if nothing breaks. | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- ----